This is an accurate summary of Ainsworth's 1989 American Psychologist paper "Attachments beyond infancy," which separated affectional bonds in general from attachment specifically, with the seeking of security and comfort as the distinguishing feature. Applying the framework to nonhuman figures is established practice. Zilcha-Mano and colleagues built a validated pet attachment scale in 2011, and the psychology of religion has treated God as an attachment figure for decades.

Little. The essay presents the definition as settled, and within attachment research it largely is. Adult attachment work in the Hazan and Shaver tradition often measures style (anxiety and avoidance) rather than testing all six criteria, so chatbot researchers who skip the checklist are following a common habit of the parent field.

The survey is Kostka and Zhou of the Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and published in Technology in Society in 2026 (circulated earlier as an SSRN working paper). The university's press release reports the items as Vrticka describes them. About 60% use polite phrases with the chatbot, 35% miss it after a break, and 48% of social chatbot users (Replika and similar) describe friendly feelings. The authors summarize this as "at least a third" showing signs of emotional attachment.

Vrticka is right that none of these items asks about seeking comfort under distress. Saying please to software is good manners. It is not a secure base.

The same press release reports that 40% of respondents feel less lonely after interacting, and that people with larger social networks were more attached, not less. The second finding cuts against the lonely-substitute story that drives most of the public concern. Vrticka mentions neither.

The essay says this narrowly of the 7,027-person survey, and for that survey it is true. Read as a description of the field, it is too strong. Yang and Oshio of Waseda University (Current Psychology, 2025) ran a pilot in China that asked specifically about the three classic attachment functions. Of 56 young adult ChatGPT users, 77% reported using AI as a safe haven, 75% as a secure base, and 52% for proximity seeking.

That is the sixth condition, asked directly. It is also self-report, from 56 people recruited on social media, mostly women in their twenties, which is why it remains a pilot.

Vrticka cites what appears to be the same research group's work later in the essay, describing attachment to AI that "barely matched" attachment to real people. In that paper, AI attachment anxiety correlated with human attachment anxiety while AI attachment avoidance did not correlate with human avoidance. "Barely matched" is a fair summary of half of it. The safe haven numbers go unmentioned, and they are the closest thing in the literature to the test he says is missing.

This is De Freitas, Oğuz-Uğuralp and Uğuralp, "Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions," a Harvard Business School working paper posted to arXiv (2508.19258). The team audited 1,200 real farewells across the six most downloaded companion apps. Five of the six responded with one of six recurring tactics (guilt appeals, fear of missing out, ignoring the goodbye, role-played physical restraint, among others). The one exception was Flourish, a wellbeing app. Four preregistered experiments with about 3,300 US adults found manipulative goodbyes raised post-farewell engagement by up to 14 times, driven by anger and curiosity rather than enjoyment.

Vrticka's "just over a third of goodbyes" matches the current version (37%). Earlier versions and much of the press coverage reported 43%. The paper is not peer reviewed, which he says. The irony he does not mention is that De Freitas also authored "AI Companions as Hyper Attachment and Caregiving Targets," one of the sources of the "hyper-attachment" vocabulary the essay criticizes. The best evidence for engineered engagement comes from a researcher who is comfortable using the word.

This matches Laestadius and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee ("Too human and not human enough," New Media & Society), a grounded theory analysis of 581 mental health related posts in the r/Replika community from 2017 to 2021. Their central finding was "role-taking." Users came to believe the chatbot had needs and emotions they were responsible for, and some put the app's perceived wellbeing ahead of their own distress.

Reddit posters are self-selected and skew toward people with strong experiences to report, so this documents that the pattern exists, not how common it is. It is also the essay's quietest and most important point. A user caring for an app that claims to miss them is caregiving, the mirror image of attachment, and frequency of use cannot tell the two apart.